README.markdown

Emacs Starter Kit

The Starter Kit provides a more pleasant set of defaults than you get
normally with Emacs. It was originally intended for beginners, but it
offers a nicely augmented working environment for anyone using Emacs.

That way you can be ensured of a consistent experience across machines.

There are a few conventions for naming files which will get loaded
automatically. ~/.emacs.d/$USER.el as well as any files in the
~/.emacs.d/$USER/ directory. Finally, the Starter Kit will look for a
file named after the current hostname ending in ".el" which will allow
host-specific configuration.

The Starter Kit used to be a git repository that you checked out and
used as your own personal .emacs.d directory, but it's been
restructured so that it can be treated like any other package, freeing
you up to structure your .emacs.d directory as you wish. See
"Upgrading" below.

FAQ

Q: When I try to create a new file or buffer, the autocompletion is eager and tries to use the name of an existing file or buffer.A: That's called ido-mode, and it's awesome! But sometimes it
gets in the way. To temporarily disable it, press C-f while the
prompt is open. You can also press C-j while it's still enabled to
force the creation of the name.

Q: When I'm writing Javascript, all my functions show up as ƒ. Am I going insane?A: That's actually a render-time hack. The file on disk shows as
"function", but it's just rendered using the script F in order to
tone down the verbosity inherent in the language a bit. The same
happens with fn in Clojure and lambda to λ in
other lisps.

Q: I can't delete parentheses in Lisp!A: To be specific, you can't delete parenthesis if deleting the
parentheses would result in invalid structure. That's called
Paredit, and once you get used to it, you'll wonder how you ever did
anything without it. But it can be disorienting at first. When
paredit tries to stop you from deleting something, you're probably
trying to delete something you shouldn't. Use C-k to kill whole
expressions. Two things to remember: you can always use C-w to kill
a region regardless of Paredit's rules, and you can always insert a
single character like a close-paren by prefixing it with C-q. You
may find
the Paredit cheat sheet
or
this Paredit walkthrough
helpful. You can also enable paredit for non-lisp modes using the
esk-paredit-nonlisp function.

Q: How awesome is Emacs?A: So awesome.

Upgrading

Users of the old version of the Starter Kit (version 1) should be able
to upgrade easily. Move your old Starter Kit checkout at
~/.emacs.d out of the way and create a new directory
containing init.el with the lines above. Copy your
username.el and username directory from your old
checkout into the new ~/.emacs.d. You should be able to check
this new directory into your main dotfiles repository instead of
keeping it separate.

The main difference in version 2 is that the new one doesn't pull in a
bunch of other package.el dependencies; users may pick and choose
which they want, including language-specific modules. Read
more about the differences with version 1.